That S So Gross History

FRIGHTFUL FACTS AND GORY STORIES . . . Top trivia about life in the past such as: Did Vikings wear horns on their helmets? How did Ancient Egyptians make their mummies? Which animals were gladiators forced to fight?

GO MAD FOR MINIBEASTS! Discover the answers to top trivia such as: Does the dung beetle really stink? Why are caterpillars so muscly? Why would fleas be champion high-jumpers? Includes cool collector cards to swap with your mates.

This entertaining volume reveals some of the grossest practices in hygiene, dining, fashion, and medicine of Medieval Europe. Serfs often smelled bad, and they bathed and relieved themselves in streams filled with garbage. Wealthier individuals who had bathrooms produced waste that was sent down chutes into the castle moat. Peasants and nobles commonly consumed animal parts that today we would consider less appetizing, including paws, brains, stomachs, and lungs. Poor nutrition resulted in rotting teeth and scurvy. Doctors were woefully backward in treating patients, using odd remedies such as ground-up worms, bloodletting through leeches, and spreading animal dung on wounds.

For millennia, messianic visions of redemption have inspired men and women to turn against unjust and oppressive orders. Yet these very same traditions are regularly decried as antecedents to the violent and authoritarian ideologies of modernity. Informed in equal parts by theology and historical theory, this book offers a provocative exploration of this double-edged legacy. Author Jayne Svenungsson rigorously pursues a middle path between utopian arrogance and an enervated postmodernism, assessing the impact of Jewish and Christian theologies of history on subsequent thinkers, and in the process identifying a web of spiritual and intellectual motifs extending from ancient Jewish prophets to contemporary radicals such as Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek.

NOXIOUS NOISES AND STINKY SMELLS . . . Amaze your mates with top trivia such as: Why do we puke and sweat? Which tribe uses farting as a greeting? How likely are you to be injured by a toilet seat?

For use in schools and libraries only. A tummy-churning treasury of lively but disgusting trivia shares historical information, cultural tidbits and sickening scientific sidebars on everything from nose picking and insect-based foods to hairballs and digestive commonalities.

Applying current political theory on nationhood as well as methods established by recent performance studies, this study sheds new light on the role the public theatre played in the rise of English national identity around 1600. It situates selected history plays by Shakespeare and Marlowe in the context of non-fictional texts (such as historiographies, chorographies, political treatises, or dictionary entries) and cultural artefacts (such as maps or portraits), and thus highlights the circulation, and mutation, of national thought in late sixteenth-century culture. At the same time, it goes beyond a New Historicist approach by foregrounding the performative surplus of the theatre event that is so essential for the shaping of collective identity. How, this study crucially asks, does the performative art of theatre contribute to the dynamics of the formation of national identity? Although theories about the nature of nationalism vary, a majority of theorists agree that notions of a shared territory and history, as well as questions of religion, class and gender play crucial roles in the shaping of national identity. These factors inform the structure of this book, and each is examined individually. In contrast to existing publications, this inquiry does not take for granted a pre-existing national identity that simply manifested itself in the literary works of the period; nor does it proceed from preconceived notions of the playwrights’ political views. Instead, it understands the early modern stage as an essentially contested space in which conflicting political positions are played off against each other, and it inquires into how the imaginative work of negotiating these stances eventually contributed to a rising national self-awareness in the spectators.